Paradox

“It’s bat-shit crazy,” Tommy said. “But no worse than most of the wild-goose chases we get sent on.”

“If the Kurds don’t kill us,” Trish said. “Or the right-wing fundamentalists.”

They had gathered in Annja’s room in the Sheraton Tower, just around the curving corridor from the suite where they held their meetings—or “briefings,” as Bostitch preferred to call them. Annja wasn’t sure whether he was following Baron’s ex-military lead or his own inclinations. For all that Bostitch presented himself as an aw-shucks folksy businessman, the graduates of his leadership academy sure seemed to see themselves as holy warriors.

Though smaller than the suite, Annja’s room was hardly less luxurious. She sat cross-legged on the wide bed. Tommy perched on the desk. Trish sat in one of the comfy chairs while Jason alternately paced like a caged leopard and stood gazing moodily out at the lights of the city.

“Might that mean it’s a good idea to try our best to get along with the others, then?” Annja asked.

“Hey, we weren’t that bad,” Tommy said. “Don’t bust our balls.”

“I don’t know whether to thank you or call you a pig,” Trish said, laughing.

“Whatev. You know what I mean.”

“Actually, you did fine,” Annja said. “I just want to encourage us all to keep that up. You guys have been in the field. You know how once you start getting tired and thirsty and sick of being either too hot or too cold all the time, tensions tend to rise. So either we need to just bail on this or do our best to keep things from getting too tense.”

“You’d do that, Annja?” Trish asked. “You seem to have, like, the most at stake here.” She seemed honestly surprised.

In a heartbeat, Annja almost said. She decided it would be unwise. And anyway it wasn’t really true. Although what Trish probably thought she had at stake in this expedition—the prospect of her own show on the network—barely registered in Annja’s determination to see this through if possible.

“If I thought it was the right thing to do, yes,” Annja said and that was true. Annja always did what she thought was right, whatever it cost her. And there had been times when it cost her greatly.

“What I don’t see,” Tommy said, “is how they can take all this Creation shit seriously.”

“No kidding,” Jason said. “Was it a pair of each kind of animal that went onto the Ark? Or seven of some and two of others? Doesn’t Genesis do it both ways?”

“Yes,” Annja said.

“Isn’t the Bible, like, full of contradictions?” Trish said.

“It is. And I have to hand the literalists credit for their ingenuity in dreaming up explanations for a lot of them. Or maybe intellectual double-jointedness.”

“I thought a lot of the fundamentalists just got by with announcing every word of the Old Testament is true, without actually reading much of it,” Tommy grumbled.

“That’s true, too. I don’t know how well that applies to our employer and his associates, though. They seem to be a studious bunch.”

“Huh,” Tommy said. “Maybe they should study the evidence a little closer. I mean, look at the pictures they got.”

He pulled his phone from its hip holster. “I was looking at some of the pictures online on my own. Take this oblique shot here from 1949. Tell me it doesn’t totally look like somebody used Photoshop to add a toy tugboat in among some rocks. Badly.”

“Dude,” Jason said. “I could be wrong, here, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t have Photoshop in ’49.”

“Whatever. You know what I mean. Cut-and-paste job with scissors and glue then. And what about this overhead from a satellite, with the so-called ‘Anomaly’ conveniently outlined in red pen? Give me a break. This just looks like someone took a picture of a random ridge and drew a boat shape around it. It looks like a fucking whale. Using that technique you could demonstrate that anything longer than it is wide is Noah’s Ark.”

“All right, you’re right,” Annja said. “All this is true. We do still have some fairly good artifacts that somebody close to Charlie brought back. And Levi—Rabbi Leibowitz—thinks there’s something up there, if not a stranded ship.”

“Yeah,” Jason said. “But what about this rabbi guy, anyway? What’s his story?”

“I think that’s more a marriage of convenience. But Levi’s based in Brooklyn. I think he’s basically apolitical. He’s into this because he thinks there is a mystery up here that could be really, really important to history. And I do, too.”

“Whoa,” Tommy breathed, mock-reverent. “Annja Creed, Chasing History’s Monsters’ resident buzz-kill specialist with all her skepticism, thinks there’s really something there?”

Trish hooted. “Could you try to be more insulting, Tommy?”

He huffed and shook his head. Annja found herself just naturally envisioning him with a baseball cap turned backward on his head. “Sorry,” he said.

“Speaking of climbing to the top,” Jason said, “what do you make of the chances of old Charlie making it up alive? He looks like he’d be all out of breath walking across the room.”

“Well, he did say he’d been climbing around Solomon’s Throne in Persia—I mean Iran,” Annja said. “Also illegally, by the way. He’s tougher than he looks. I think he actually goes through his own academy physical-training courses in the summer.”

“He must do a lot of training to keep that shape, then,” Tommy said. “Like, at the buffet tables.”

“And happy hour,” Trish said.

“And what’s with this Wilfork guy?” Jason said. “He looks worse if anything.”

“Tommy says he smokes like a chimney,” Trish said. “He always sees him when he sneaks out for a smoke.”

“Dude,” Tommy said aggrievedly.

“He’s probably tougher than he looks, too,” Annja said. “When he was filling me in on the whole Turkish political situation, he said he’d spent his whole career chasing from one trouble spot to the next.”

“Yeah,” Trish said. “He’s a pretty famous crisis journalist.”

“As long as he doesn’t have a crisis with his heart halfway up the damned mountain and we have to beg the Turkish army for a medevac chopper,” Tommy said.

Jason grunted. “Be lucky if we didn’t get a helicopter gunship,” he said.

“Also, what’s up with that whole mountain-peak thing, anyway?” Tommy said. “Fifteen thousand feet? God’s supposed to have flooded the Earth three miles deep?”

“That’s what our associates believe,” Annja said.

Tommy shook his head in wonder. “Whoa,” he said.

THE NEXT FEW DAYS PASSED slowly for Annja. It was a relief not to have the hassles of organizing and outfitting an expedition into hostile territory as her responsibility. Ankara’s unseasonable warmth gave way to the equally unseasonable chill that had already descended on the rest of the country. Yet not running the show had one big drawback—it left her without much to do.

Although a vast and highly modern mall, the Karum, stood right across the street from the hotel, Annja had never bothered to venture inside. She didn’t feel enough attraction to brave the crowds. She was not a shopping goddess, nor even particularly interested in shopping beyond what was necessary to keep her clothes from wearing out to the point of falling off her body. She’d rather be sitting on her couch in her apartment poring through her stacks of printouts of papers submitted to obscure journals of archaeological arcana. Like Rabbi Leibowitz, basically, but with a few more social skills.

But she could always wander the archaeological sites and museums. Fortunately, as she’d mentioned to the CHM crew, the city abounded in those.

Even they palled eventually. Two days after the CHM team’s arrival from New York she decided to head south on foot through the section called Kavaklidere, which was a former vineyard. Its most prominent features now were her own enormous hotel, the high-rise Karum and, several hundred yards south, the equally ostentatious tower of the Hilton.

She spent a pleasant, if cool and windy, day in the botanical gardens. The park occupied a hill south of the big hill, Kale, on which the Ankara Citadel stood a few blocks north of the Sheraton. Hill and park alike were dominated by the Atakule Tower, named like so many things for Kemal Atatürk, founder of the modern Turkish republic. The tower was a spindly white four-hundred-plus-foot spire with a sort of space-needle flying saucer at the top—a similarity acknowledged by the presence of the UFO Café and Bar within, along with two more upscale-looking restaurants.

After the brief warm spell autumn had returned with vindictive force that hinted at a truly brutal winter to follow.

In her puffy down jacket Annja found the breezes blowing down from the Köro lu Mountains to the north, already well-socked-in with snow according to the Internet, bracing rather than uncomfortable. Although no blossoms survived in the park’s beautifully designed and tended gardens, and the merciless winds had stripped the leaves from the deciduous trees, the park was planted thickly with evergreens, tall pines and fir trees. And even the bare limbs beneath which the numerous hill paths twined created interesting, intricate shapes against a lead-clouded sky.